Benchmarks for Evaluating Compliance with NYC's Protected Time Off Law

• In Event: Local Experiences with Paid Sick Leave Laws: Implementation, Enforcement, and Preemption

Abstract

Throughout the country, many state and local governments, including the City of New York, have enacted laws requiring employers to provide employees with sick leave benefits that meet minimum standards. The City of New York has some of the nation’s strongest sick leave protections. As the agency charged with enforcing NYC’s Protected Time Off Law (the Law), the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) is committed to ensuring that workers can fully access them. To that end, DCWP developed a new data-driven approach that analyzes rates of paid sick leave use in employer records to identify possible violations of the Law. The approach relies on empirical findings using national data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s annual National Health Interview Survey. Specifically, the study finds that, (1) among employees with paid sick leave, half miss at least one workday due to their own illness, injury, or disability each year, and that (2) this percentage varies only modestly across different types of jobs or between demographic groups. Building on this finding, DCWP concludes that if a low percentage of employees at a given firm use paid sick leave relative to expectations, it is reasonable to conclude that an employer has an official or unofficial policy or practice of not providing or refusing to allow the use of protected time off in violation of the Law. To evaluate this, DCWP utilizes a constant hazard model to calculate the expected share of employees who should use sick leave based on industry benchmarks and employee work duration, compares this to the employer’s observed usage rate, and flags statistically significant shortfalls as evidence of potential noncompliance. The benefits of DCWP’s study are twofold. First, employers can use this study to self-audit their own employees’ use of sick leave to evaluate their compliance with the Law. Second, DCWP will use this study in Protected Time Off investigations and enforcement actions. When DCWP identifies low actual usage rates compared to expected usage rates, along with other evidence that workers had problems accessing protected time off, DCWP will take enforcement action on behalf of all affected employees. By grounding enforcement in rigorous data analysis, DCWP can more effectively detect barriers to compliance, focus resources where workers are most at risk, and ensure that paid sick leave is a right that exists in practice, and not just on paper.

Author

• Michael Papadopoulos, NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection
  Presenting Author